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COREL GALLERY 380,000 As a Corel devotee and a certified clipart-aholic, I looked forward to a loving relationship with these Corel images. It was not to be. After a simple installation, I opened to the main screen and did a search on the word "Christmas." It came up with over 1000 hits, but the thumbnails were all the same generic icon. When I tried to open one, I was asked to "insert CD 2." I did so, but there was no response. The same dialogue box appeared over and over, and did not respond to the fact that I had put the proper CD in the drive. I tried again with another image and another CD, with the same results. A third try brought something even more bizarre, when I clicked on an image to open it, it opened in Quick View Plus (a Windows utility). A trip through the manual described all manner of support options, most of them costing $$. I was led to Corel's web site, where the only free option was to send them an email message, which I did. Their reply was prompt: "If the Gallery browser does not have ample time for the system to read the CD, it goes into what we commonly refer to as the "insert Loop" and the message doesn't go away. The only workarounds are to allow the CD to read and have the images automatically pop up after the CD is recognized or you can shut down the Gallery browser and relaunch it so that the browser will be reading off the new CD..." At this point, my patience grew thin. I decided to check out the fonts before throwing in the towel. The manual indicated that they were on CD1, although there was nothing on the CD label that said so. I was unable to access them directly. Any attempt to read the contents of the CD launched the installation setup. I decided on a frontal attack. In DOS, I down-loaded the fonts and sounds to my hard drive. With My Portfolio (freeware) I was able to catalogue the jpeg photos (which are very nice, I admit). The clipart, however, is in CCX format which can only be read by Corel Photo House or by this thoroughly annoying Gallery browser. There's nice stuff here, but accessing it is a pain in the neck. The price is worth it for the fonts alone, but I wouldn't recommend it to any but the seasoned user. Corel Gallery 380,000 |